The present application relates generally to an improved data processing apparatus and method and more specifically to mechanisms for indexing and querying spatial graphs.
Graph/link data are becoming increasingly available, with the explosion of social media, such as Twitter®, call graphs in telephone companies, or the like). Several products such as Database 2 Resource Description Framework (DB2 RDF), RDF-3X, and Oracle® Spatial/Graph now provide support for graph data storage and querying. Several of these graph data sources have spatial markers embedded as first class data citizens, which may come from various sources such as smartphones that are location enabled, cars with Global Positioning System (GPS) devices. With the exception of Oracle® Spatial/Graph, there is no support for indexing and retrieving spatial data from graph data stores. In the context of Oracle® Spatial/Graph, spatial data indexing is supported in an inefficient manner—spatial index is separately maintained in the spatial database and queries are answered by breaking down the query into a spatial counterpart and a graph counterpart. This results in significantly extra storage and the query inefficiency. There is no indexing support for graph/link data in the graph data store.